The Real Spider Wasn’t Killed for Talking Back — Goodfellas Lied – HT
July 1970, Robert’s Lounge, 1445 Lefferts Boulevard, South Ozone Park, Queens. The back room smelled like cigarette smoke, stale beer, and the cheap aftershave Tommy DeSimone slapped on every morning before he came to work the streets. A poker table, six men. A skinny 16-year-old kid carrying a tray of drinks.
Tommy drew his snub-nosed revolver from his waistband. He aimed at the boy’s chest. He fired three times. The kid hit the floor before the third shell casing stopped rolling. The room went silent. The cards stayed face down. And a teenager named Michael Gianco bled out on the floor of a saloon owned by one of the most feared men in New York.
He was 16 years old. He had a mother waiting for him at home in Brownsville. His shift was supposed to end at midnight. This wasn’t some defiant young hood mouthing off to a made guy. That’s it, sweet. Why don’t you go [ __ ] yourself, Tommy? That’s the movie version. That’s what Hollywood sold you. The real Michael Gianco, nicknamed Spider for his thin frame and long limbs, was a Lucchese crime family associate sponsored by his connected uncle.
Working a legitimate union bartending job at the most dangerous bar in Queens. He was a kid with a card, a kid with a future, a kid whose name should have meant something. This is the story of how a teenage bartender in a borrowed white shirt walked into the wrong poker game on the wrong night. And how his murder became one of the most misremembered killings in American mob history.
This is what Goodfellas got wrong. This is what Henry Hill admitted when nobody was filming. This is the truth about Spider, Tommy DeSimone, Jimmy Burke, and a basement floor in Ozone Park that hid a body for 43 years. But here’s what the history books don’t tell you. The real Spider wasn’t shot for talking back.
He was shot for for getting a glass of Crown Royal. And the man who pulled the trigger wasn’t punished. He was protected until the day the FBI showed up with jackhammers. To understand how a 16-year-old kid ended up dead on the floor of Robert’s Lounge, you have to understand the world he was born into. Michael Gianco came into this life in 1954 in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Italian immigrant family. People from Olbia, Sardinia. Hard-working, religious, and surrounded by the gravitational pull of organized crime on every block. In Brownsville in the 1950s, the question wasn’t whether you knew somebody connected. The question was, how many? Spider’s uncle was a connected guy, a Lucchese associate.
That made Spider, by extension, somebody. Somebody small, somebody on the bottom rung, but somebody. He was a thin kid, quiet, the kind of teenager who watched more than he talked. By 15, he’d been hanging around the right corners, running errands for the right people, learning the geometry of streets where favors were currency and silence was survival.
By 16, his uncle had pulled some strings. Paul Vario, the Lucchese capo who ran the entire Brownsville-East New York crew, made sure Spider got a card in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union. That card was gold. It meant a real paycheck. It meant a future. It meant Spider could legally pour drinks at any bar in the five boroughs.
And the bar where they placed him was Robert’s Lounge. You have to understand what Robert’s Lounge was. It wasn’t a bar, not really. It was a courtroom, a bank, a confessional, and a slaughterhouse all in one. Owned by James Burke, known to the world as Jimmy the Gent, Robert’s Lounge was the operational headquarters of one of the most violent crews in American organized crime history.
Burke ran the place from the late 1950s straight through to the end of the ’70s. Hijackings were planned in the back booths. Loan shark debts were collected at the bar. Bodies, more than a few, ended up underneath the unfinished section of the basement floor. This was where they sent a 16-year-old kid to pour drinks.
Spider’s first night, he was nervous. According to Henry Hill’s later recollections, the kid was so anxious he could barely hold the tray steady. The men at the tables were not normal customers. These were soldiers, hijackers, killers. Jimmy Burke himself, sitting in his usual booth, watching everything with those cold blue eyes that gave nothing away.
Tommy DeSimone, 20 years old, already a homicidal maniac with at least one confirmed kill behind him. Henry Hill, the half-Irish, half-Sicilian street operator who would one day become the most famous informant in mob history, and a rotating cast of associates, wannabes, and full members of the Lucchese family. Spider learned fast. He had to.
He memorized drinks. He kept his eyes down. He smiled when he was supposed to smile. And he stayed alive night after night in a room full of men who killed people for sport. But here’s the thing about Tommy DeSimone. Tommy was different. Even by the standards of Robert’s Lounge, even by the standards of a Burke crew where violence was the only language anyone respected, Tommy was a problem.
He was unstable. He laughed when he hurt people. He drew his pistol over arguments about football scores. The other guys in the crew called him a hothead behind his back. Some called him worse. But nobody said it to his face because Tommy had already proven what he was willing to do. Just weeks before that July night, Tommy had been part of the killing of William Bentvena, the made Gambino soldier known as Billy Bats.
Bentvena had insulted Tommy at a bar called The Suite. Tommy waited six months. Then he and Burke beat Bentvena nearly to death, threw him in the trunk of a car, drove him to upstate New York, and finished the job with a tire iron and a shovel. That murder was a problem. Bentvena was a made guy. Killing him without permission was a death sentence under mob protocol.
Tommy and Burke spent the rest of 1970 looking over their shoulders, waiting for the Gambinos to find out, waiting for the hammer. That was the man Spider was serving drinks to, a killer with a death sentence hanging over him, a man with no patience, no impulse control, and a loaded revolver tucked into his waistband.
Now picture the night it happened. It’s July 1970. The poker game has been going for hours. The men are drunk, sweaty, irritable. Money is changing hands. Tempers are short. Tommy DeSimone is losing. He calls out for another drink, Crown Royal, his usual. Spider, 16 years old, juggling six tables and a hundred orders, forgets.
He brings drinks for everyone else. He leaves Tommy with an empty glass. Tommy notices. Tommy’s face changes. The smile becomes something else, something thinner. He calls Spider over. The kid walks over with the tray. Tommy says something. Witnesses later remember different versions of the words, but the rough sense was clear.
Where’s my drink? You forget me? Spider apologizes. He turns to walk back to the bar. He never makes it. According to Henry Hill’s account, Tommy didn’t even fully stand up. He just drew the gun, raised it, and fired three rounds into the kid’s chest at point-blank range. Some accounts say two shots. Hill’s own retelling varied across the years.
What every version agrees on is this. The bullets caught Spider center mass. He went down. The men at the tables didn’t move. The cards stayed face down. The chips didn’t even rattle. Because in Robert’s Lounge in 1970, when Tommy DeSimone shot a kid, you didn’t move. You didn’t speak. You waited to see what Jimmy Burke wanted to do.
And what Jimmy Burke wanted to do was scream. Burke came out of his booth like a freight train. According to Hill, who told the story a dozen different ways over the rest of his life, the boss erupted. He grabbed Tommy by the collar. He shouted into his face. The line that survived in Hill’s telling, the one that became a footnote in mob historiography, was something close to, “You dumb expletive. Now I got to dig a hole.
” Now you’re going to dig the [ __ ] thing up. You’re going to dig the hole. You’re going to Burke wasn’t furious because a 16-year-old kid had just been murdered. He was furious because the kid was somebody. Spider had a connected uncle. Spider was vouched for. Spider had Paul Vario’s union card in his pocket.
You did not kill a Lucchese associate over a forgotten cocktail. There were rules, even at Robert’s Lounge. But the rules only mattered for about 90 seconds. Then practicality took over. Burke barked orders. The basement, the unfinished section, the dirt floor. Tommy, you killed him, you bury him. Get a shovel.
Get him cold. Get him gone. The poker game stopped. Two of the men carried Spider’s body down the back staircase. Tommy followed with a shovel. Burke followed with a flashlight. The kid was buried in the dirt floor under the back of the building. No coffin. No prayer. No phone call to his mother. Just dirt.
Just silence. Just the start of 43 years underground. Upstairs, the poker game resumed within an hour. Henry Hill, in his book and later interviews, said it haunted him. The casualness of it. The way the cards were dealt again like nothing had happened. Like a 16-year-old kid hadn’t just been shot in the chest and dragged through a doorway.
That was the moment, Hill later said, when he understood what Burke and DeSimone really were. Not gangsters, not businessmen, just predators with a basement. Now here’s where the story gets complicated because the killing of Spider wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of a cover-up that lasted four decades. The first problem was Spider’s family.
The kid had a mother. He had relatives. He had an uncle who was a Lucchese associate. People started asking questions. “Where’s Michael? Why didn’t he come home?” Burke handled it the way Burke handled everything. He lied. He told the family Spider had run off, maybe to Florida, maybe to California. “Kids that age, you know how they are.
He’s probably chasing a girl. Probably back in a few weeks.” The Lucchese family looked into it quietly. Burke had powerful protection inside the Luccheses, particularly through Paul Vario himself. Vario had vouched for Spider, but Vario also depended on Burke for hijacking revenue. Money won. The investigation went away.
Spider became a missing person on a piece of paper and a body in a basement. The second problem was Tommy DeSimone himself. Tommy was already on borrowed time over the Billy Batts murder. The Spider killing made things worse. It demonstrated what every made guy in New York already suspected. Tommy was uncontrollable.
He couldn’t be trusted around civilians. He couldn’t be trusted around earners. He was a liability with a gun. The Gambino family eventually got their answer about Billy Batts. In January 1979, Tommy DeSimone walked into a meeting and never walked out. His body has never been found. The official mob theory is that the Gambinos finally got to him.
Some say John Gotti himself approved the hit. Tommy was 28 years old when he disappeared. The kid he shot at Robert’s Lounge had been 16. The math of mob retribution is rarely poetic, but sometimes, just sometimes, it rhymes. The third problem was the Lufthansa heist, December 11th, 1978. Burke’s crew, with Tommy DeSimone as one of the muscle men, hit the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK Airport for nearly $6 million in cash and just under $900,000 in jewelry.
It was the largest cash robbery in American history at that point. And in the months that followed, Burke methodically eliminated almost every man who had been involved. Bodies started turning up across Queens and Brooklyn. Trunks of cars, refrigerator trucks, frozen meat lockers.
Burke didn’t trust anyone with knowledge. The heist crew was systematically erased. By 1980, more than a dozen people connected to Lufthansa were dead, missing, or in hiding. Robert’s Lounge, with its dirt floor and its conveniently unfinished basement, was rumored for decades to hold more than just one body. Henry Hill, by then, was running scared.
He’d been arrested in 1980 on a drug case. He knew Burke was cleaning house. He knew his name was on the list. So, Hill did the unthinkable. He flipped. He went to the FBI. He put on a wire. He sat down with prosecutors and started telling them everything. Every hijacking, every murder, every body. And one of the first names out of his mouth was Michael Spider Gianco.
The kid who got shot for forgetting a drink. The kid in the basement. The FBI listened. They took notes. They built cases. Burke went down for racketeering and the murder of a man named Richard Eaton. Hill testified. Burke got 20 years. He died in prison in 1996 of lung cancer at age 64. Tommy was already gone.
Paul Vario died in federal custody in 1988. The crew was finished. But Spider’s body, according to Hill’s repeated statements, was still down there. Still in the dirt. Still waiting. For more than 30 years, the FBI knew the rough location. They had Hill’s testimony. They had the address. They had the basement. But they didn’t dig.
The bar had changed hands. The neighborhood had changed. The political will to excavate a private property based on the testimony of a known informant from the ’70s wasn’t there. Robert’s Lounge became a cleaning supply store. Then it became something else. The dirt floor stayed where it was, with its secret intact.
Then came June 2013. The trigger wasn’t Spider. The trigger was Vincent Asaro, an old Bonanno soldier who federal investigators have been building a case against for years, with a focus on the Lufthansa heist itself. Looking for any leverage, any new evidence, any old body that might be down there, the FBI got a warrant.
They arrived at 11445 Lefferts Boulevard with a backhoe, jackhammers, ground-penetrating radar, and a forensic recovery team. They tore up the floor. They dug for days. The story was front-page news in the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and on every cable network. FBI digs at mob hangout.
Hunting bodies in Goodfellas bar. The press swarmed the block. Old-timers from Ozone Park stood on the corner and told reporters they remembered Burke. They remembered DeSimone. They remembered the kid who used to pour drinks. What the FBI found, according to multiple news reports, were possible human remains, bone fragments, material consistent with human burial.
The remains were sent for forensic analysis, DNA, dental records, carbon dating. The process took years. The exact identification of every fragment recovered has been the subject of dispute, partial confirmation, and quiet resolution. What’s documented is that the dig was based, in significant part, on the long-standing testimony of Henry Hill regarding the burial of Spider Gianco in that exact location.
What’s also documented is that Robert’s Lounge had likely held multiple bodies over its years of operation, not just one. Spider’s family, by then, had been waiting 43 years. 43 years of not knowing. 43 years of wondering if their kid had really run off the way Jimmy the Gent had told them.
43 years of holidays with an empty chair. The dig in 2013 didn’t bring Spider back, but it confirmed what they’d suspected since 1970. The kid hadn’t run away. The kid had been buried under a bar, 14 blocks from his uncle’s house, by the man he’d been pouring drinks for. That’s the real story of Spider. Not a wise-cracking teenager who flipped off Tommy DeSimone over a card game.
A 16-year-old kid with a union card and a connected uncle, killed over a forgotten glass of whiskey, buried in a dirt basement, remembered by a single line of dialogue in a Hollywood movie that got almost everything about him wrong. But here’s the strange afterlife of Michael Spider Gianco.
The kid himself never made it past 16. His name barely appeared in any newspaper for 40 years. But the character, the version of him in Goodfellas, made a different man’s career. The actor who played Spider in the 1990 film was a young performer named Michael Imperioli. He got two scenes. The first scene, he gets shot in the foot by Joe Pesci’s Tommy.
The second scene, he stands up to Pesci, and Pesci empties a revolver into his chest. The killing scene was reshot multiple times. Imperioli, in interviews afterward, said the role haunted him. The rage in Pesci’s eyes, the casualness of the violence, the way the men at the table just kept playing cards. That role got Imperioli noticed.
A few years later, a writer named David Chase was casting a new HBO show about a New Jersey crime family. He’d seen Goodfellas. He remembered the kid who got shot in the foot. He cast Imperioli as Christopher Moltisanti, the volatile young soldier in The Sopranos. Imperioli won an Emmy for the role in 2004.
He became one of the defining faces of mob television in the 21st century. And in one episode of The Sopranos, in a small bakery in New Jersey, his character accidentally shoots a young employee in the foot and shouts, “It happens.” A direct callback to Goodfellas. A direct callback to Spider. A direct callback to a kid in Brownsville who never got to grow up.
The fictional Spider survived in popular culture, got famous, got remembered, won an Emmy by proxy. Meanwhile, the real Michael Gianco lay in the dirt under a former saloon at 11445 Lefferts Boulevard for 43 years. His name reduced to a footnote in the most famous mob movie ever made. That’s how it goes in the world of organized crime.
The men with the guns get the books. The men with the guns get the films. The men with the guns get to tell their version, edit out their cruelty, and reshape a 16-year-old kid into a defiant young punk who deserved what he got. The truth, the actual truth, is uglier and smaller and sadder. A teenager forgot a drink. A psychopath had a gun. A boss had a basement.
And the rest was decades of silence. Tommy DeSimone vanished in 1979, 28 years old, probably killed by the Gambinos, body never found. Jimmy Burke died in prison in 1996 at 64 years old, never confessing to a single one of the murders attributed to him. Paul Vario died in federal custody in 1988. Henry Hill died in 2012 at 69 in California, in witness protection, just a year before the FBI finally tore up the floor he’d been telling them about for 30 years.
The men who killed Spider all died bad. The bar where they killed him was excavated, exposed, reduced to a crime scene with cameras rolling. The myth of the wise-cracking teenage waiter was buried right alongside the truth, but only one of those things came back to the surface. And the kid himself, 16 years old, Italian immigrant family from Sardinia, Brownsville accent, skinny arms.
A union card from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees that was supposed to be his ticket to to real life. He never got to use it. He poured his last drink at Robert’s Lounge in July of 1970. He never made it home. His mother went to her grave not knowing exactly what had happened to her son. His uncle, the connected Lucchese associate who had vouched for him, never publicly raised hell over the killing because in that world raising hell got you buried next to your nephew.
That’s the cost of being somebody small in a world built by somebody’s big. You don’t get a movie. You don’t get a name. You get a basement floor and 43 years of waiting for somebody to dig. There’s a lesson in this story, but it’s not the one Hollywood likes to tell. It’s not about loyalty. It’s not about family.
It’s not about honor among thieves. It’s about the math of being expendable. Tommy DeSimone killed Spider over a forgotten cocktail. Jimmy Burke buried the kid because cleaning up was cheaper than discipline. Paul Vario looked the other way because hijacking money was worth more than a 16-year-old’s life. Henry Hill sat at the table while it happened, then dined out on the story for the next 40 years.
Nobody who killed Spider ever paid for that specific killing. Not in court, not in writing. They paid for other things. Burke for racketeering, Vario for parole violations, Tommy with his life, probably for Billy Batts. The system that allowed a 16-year-old to die on a bar floor and disappear under a basement was the same system that protected the men who put him there until that system collapsed under the weight of its own informants and excavations.
If you want to understand the mafia, don’t watch the movies. Watch the basements. Look for the kids who never made it home. Count the union cards that went unused. The real story of organized crime isn’t the bosses and the heists and the loyalty. It’s the spiders. The teenagers who poured drinks.
The ones who forgot the Crown Royal. The ones who got buried where nobody would ever find them until 43 years later the FBI showed up with jackhammers and finally pulled them out of the dirt. If you found this story compelling, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below. What forgotten name from the world of organized crime should we cover next? Because for every Henry Hill, for every Jimmy Burke, for every Tommy DeSimone, there’s a Spider Gianco.
And those are the stories that deserve to be told.